A modern GPU includes texture processing hardware configured to perform a variety of texture-related (including surface-related) operations, including texture load operations, texture store operations and texture cache operations. The texture processing hardware accesses surface texture information from the texture cache under varying circumstances, such as while rendering object surfaces in a three-dimensional (3D) graphics scene for display on a display device, while rendering a two-dimensional (2D) graphics scene, or during compute operations. Surface texture information includes texture elements (texels) used to texture or shade object surfaces in a 3D graphics scene. Typically, the texture processing hardware and associated texture cache are optimized for efficient, high throughput read-only access to support the high demand for texture information during graphics rendering, with little or no support for write operations. Further, the texture processing hardware includes specialized functional units to perform various texture operations, such as level of detail (LOD) computation, texture sampling, and texture filtering.